One of my incidental hosts whom I particularly remember, a friend of the Journalist and a school inspector by profession, was full of enterprise and enthusiasm for a scheme he propounded for including gardening and such things in the regular school curriculum of his circuit. His plans were still regarded with some mistrust by those in power, for his political prejudices were known, but he none the less had hope that the Communists would allow him to introduce his innovations, which I believe he eventually did successfully.
The Journalist was promoted to the position of dieloproizvoditel of his department, a post giving him a negligible rise of salary, but in which practically all official papers passed through his hands. At his own initiative he used to abstract papers he thought would be of interest to me, restoring them before their absence could be discovered. Some of the things he showed me were illuminating, others useless. But good, bad, or indifferent, he always produced them with a sly look and with his finger at the side of his nose, as if the information they contained must be of the utmost consequence.
I persuaded him to sell off some of his books as a subsidiary means of subsistence, and we called a Jew in, who haggled long and hard. The Journalist was loth to do this, but I refused ever to give him more than the cost of his fuel, over which also I exerted a control of Bolshevist severity. He had no conception whatever of relative values, and attached though he was to me I thought I sometimes detected in his eye a look which said with unspeakable contempt: “You miserly Englishman!”
I was unfortunate in losing Maria as a regular companion and friend. She returned to Marsh’s country farm in the hope of saving at least something from destruction, and visited town but rarely. In her place there came to live at the empty flat “No. 5” the younger of the two stable-boys, a dull but decent youth who had not joined the looters. This boy did his best no doubt to keep things in order, but tidiness and cleanliness were not his peculiar weaknesses. He could not understand why glasses or spoons should be washed, or why even in an untenanted flat tables and chairs should occasionally be dusted. Once, the tea he had made me tasting unusually acrid, I went into the kitchen to investigate the teapot. On removing the lid I found it to be half full of dead beetles.
Stepanovna continued to be a good friend. Dmitri’s regiment was removed to a town in the interior, and Dmitri, reluctant though he was to leave the capital, docilely followed, influenced largely by the new regimental commissar who had succeeded in making himself popular—a somewhat rare achievement amongst commissars. Even Stepanovna admitted this unusual circumstance, allowing that the commissar was a poriadotchny tchelovziek, i.e. a decent person, “although he was a Communist,” and she thus acquiesced in Dmitri’s departure.
It was in Stepanovna’s company that I first witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of an armed raid by the Bolshevist authorities on a public market. Running across her in the busy Siennaya Square one morning I found she had been purchasing meat, which was a rare luxury. She had an old black shawl over her head and carried a bast basket on her arm.
“Where did you get the meat?” I asked. “I will buy some too.”
“Don’t,” she said, urgently. “In the crowd they are whispering that there is going to be a raid.”
“What sort of a raid?”
“On the meat, I suppose. Yesterday and today the peasants have been bringing it in and I have got a little. I don’t want to lose it. They say the Reds are coming.”
Free-trading being clearly opposed to the principles of Communism, it was officially forbidden and denounced as “speculation.” But no amount of restriction could suppress it, and the peasants brought food in to the hungry townspeople despite all obstacles and sold it at their own prices. The only remedy the authorities had for this “capitalist evil” was armed force, and even that was ineffective.
The meat was being sold by the peasants in a big glass-covered shed. One of these sheds was burnt down in 1919, and the only object that remained intact was an icon in the corner. Thousands came to see the icon that had been “miraculously” preserved, but it was hastily taken away by the authorities. The icon had apparently been overlooked, for it was the practice of the Bolsheviks to remove all religious symbols from public places.
I moved toward the building to make my purchase, but Stepanovna tugged me by the arm.
“Don’t be mad,” she exclaimed. “Don’t you realize, if there is a raid, they will arrest everybody?”
She pulled me down to speak in my ear.
“And what about your … ? I am sure … your papers … are. …”
“Of course they are,” I laughed. “But you don’t expect a clown of a Red guard to see the difference, do you?”
I made up my mind to get rid of Stepanovna and come back later for some meat, but all at once a commotion arose in the crowd over the way and people began running out of the shed. Round the corner, from the side of the Ekaterina Canal, appeared a band of soldiers in sheepskin caps and brown-grey tunics, with fixed bayonets. The
